Psalms of David

I looked for commentaries for psalm 36 online. Many of them are on verses 5 to 24, ommiting the first four verses which are about the wicked. To me this is like ignoring the whole context, why do people do this?

Psalms in Book 1 (Psalms 1 to 41) are primarily personal songs, so I will look at how they apply to us personally. Social and communal aspects of life and work do not come in until the later books of Psalms.

The books of Psalms are roughly themed like this:

Book 1: Psalms 1 – 41: God is beside us.
Book 2: Psalms 42 – 72: God goes before us
Book 3: Psalms 73 – 89: God is all around us.
Book 4: Psalms 90 – 106: God is above us.
Book 5: Psalms 107 – 150: God is among us.

To the choirmaster. Of David, the servant of the Lord.

36 Transgression speaks to the wicked
    deep in his heart;
there is no fear of God
    before his eyes.
² For he flatters himself in his own eyes
    that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated.
³ The words of his mouth are trouble and deceit;
    he has ceased to act wisely and do good.
⁴ He plots trouble while on his bed;
    he sets himself in a way that is not good;
    he does not reject evil.

⁵ Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens,
    your faithfulness to the clouds.
⁶ Your righteousness is like the mountains of God;
    your judgements are like the great deep;
    man and beast you save, O Lord.

⁷ How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
    The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.

⁸ They feast on the abundance of your house,
    and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
⁹ For with you is the fountain of life;
    in your light do we see light.
¹⁰ Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you,
    and your righteousness to the upright of heart!

¹¹ Let not the foot of arrogance come upon me,
    nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.
¹² There the evildoers lie fallen;
    they are thrust down, unable to rise.

Psalm 36 ESVUK with added paragraphs, bold and italics.

Context is everything. This is especially true of the Psalms, which are songs, and poetry. Songs have structure and the structure here is a chiasm, meaning crossing over, a form used in nearly all of the psalms and is a repetition of similar ideas in the reverse sequence. The position of the psalms in the psalter is also important and they are often placed together with songs of similar, or contrasting, meaning.

But let me digress for a moment. There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a person on a beach mission who went up to a man on the beach and asked, “Have you been saved?” The man replied, “I haven’t been in yet.” There is an idea that verse 6 in saying, “Man and beast you save, O Lord,” shows that animals go to heaven. The problem here is that the words used for saved or salvation are not special spiritual words which are only about going to heaven but everyday words, verse 6 could be about being saved from the sea as much as going to heaven. It is all down to context. In David’s psalms, saved is usually about being saved from the hostility of humans that oppose him. God can save in a physical sense too, it does not have to be spiritual.

Back to Psalm 36 in its entirety. You are safe with God. I like to look at what they say as a whole as well as where they sit. The psalms on either side are about God saving individuals from their enemies, and Psalms 34 and 35 are Messianic psalms which use words which point to Jesus Christ, psalm 34 to the crucifixion and 35 to Jesus’ arrest and trial. Looked at as a whole this psalm looks like the prayer of someone who has come to the Tabernacle or temple for sanctuary and the middle sections are a song about God’s steadfast love.

The song has two repeated parts with a central section. I have used italics for the second part and bold for the central section, as well as adding paragraphs in the reading above.

The subject of this psalm is people who come to God for safety, but it stands within the wider context of living with opposition as are the songs on either side. The context comes from the first part of the psalm in verses 1 – 4 and 11 – 12.

There is a phrase in verse 1a that is translated two ways. “Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart;” his heart can also be my heart. It speaks of people whose hearts are away from God being strengthened by their wrongdoing. They do wrong things not because of a lack of conscience, they know it is wrong; they do bad things because they think they can get away with it, and when they do get away with it they are emboldened to do it again and even get worse.

If we look at verse 1a the other way, David says, “Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in my heart.” David has the heart of God and feels God’s sadness for the law-breaking of wicked people. But knowing God’s sadness, David can prophesy in verses 11 and 12, wicked people will not get away with it, he says, using a prophetic tense as if that has already happened. God is in control.

There is a keyword in the rest of the psalm which is really what this song is all about. It is in verses 5, 7 and 10 and is translated here in the ESV as steadfast love and in the King James Bible as grace in verse 5 and as lovingkindness in verses 7 and 10. The Hebrew word is chesed. It is a word that works several ways as there is no direct equivalent in English. It has a meaning of grace because it is free and steadfast because it is strong. It is used in Hebrew as hasid (the ch is pronounced like the ch in the Scots word loch), meaning someone whose charitable acts go above and beyond the call of duty, and is also the root word behind the Jewish Hasidic movement. Putting all that together we have God’s lovingkindness is strong, it goes above and beyond what is necessary and is freely given, we don’t need to do anything to earn it, only come to God and receive it.

There is a negative side to chesed too. It is about strong desire and has its dark side. Chesed is also used in the Old Testament to mean reproach or disgrace. We happily sing Your lovingkindness is better than life ( Psalm 63:3), I wonder how many Christians would be happy to sing Your reproach is better than life? Yet the reproach of God is equally part of his love for us as his kindness.

Part 2 (verses 5 to 6 and 8 to 11) contains the whole water cycle. Rain clouds and the deep in the first part and rivers in the second part rivers of refreshments and fountains of life are mentioned. This could be the passage Jesus drew on when he spoke about rivers of living water. Other themes in this section are the universality of chesed and the righteousness of God,

The central section, v 7, is about God’s love for those who follow (part 2) him and his reproach, in love, for those whose rejection of God leads them further and further from God. It saddens God who wishes that all will turn from actions that harm others. What they do is not hidden from God. If you are in this position, God is longing for you to respond to the rebuke and turn around and come to him. God’s steadfast love and God’s rebuke are part of the same thing, whichever you are hearing I pray you act on it.

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